Docker-Machine: how to create a docker vm on a remote virtualbox server

After doing some first steps with docker, i wanted to test docker-swarm. Because of the limited resources of my notebook, i was looking for a Linux with a minimal footprint. In the context of setting up VMs for docker-swarm i found a log of articles about doing that with the tool docker-machine.
It sounds like this tool can create VMs just with one command. (here the documentation).

So let's give it a try:
(You have to install docker-machine first, but you do not need to install docker itself)

~$ docker-machine create --driver virtualbox test
Creating CA: /home/schroff/.docker/machine/certs/ca.pem
Creating client certificate: /home/schroff/.docker/machine/certs/cert.pem
Running pre-create checks...
(test) Image cache directory does not exist, creating it at /home/schroff/.docker/machine/cache...
(test) No default Boot2Docker ISO found locally, downloading the latest release...
(test) Latest release for github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker is v17.11.0-ce
(test) Downloading /home/schroff/.docker/machine/cache/boot2docker.iso from https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker/releases/download/v17.11.0-ce/boot2docker.iso...
(test) 0%....10%....20%....30%....40%....50%....60%....70%....80%....90%....100%
Creating machine...
(test) Copying /home/schroff/.docker/machine/cache/boot2docker.iso to /home/schroff/.docker/machine/machines/test/boot2docker.iso...
(test) Creating VirtualBox VM...
(test) Creating SSH key...
(test) Starting the VM...
(test) Check network to re-create if needed...
(test) Found a new host-only adapter: "vboxnet0"
(test) Waiting for an IP...
Waiting for machine to be running, this may take a few minutes...
Detecting operating system of created instance...
Waiting for SSH to be available...
Detecting the provisioner...
Provisioning with boot2docker...
Copying certs to the local machine directory...
Copying certs to the remote machine...
Setting Docker configuration on the remote daemon...
Checking connection to Docker...
Docker is up and running!
To see how to connect your Docker Client to the Docker Engine running on this virtual machine, run: docker-machine env test

Wow.
After this command inside my virtualbox a new machine shows up with 1GB RAM, 20 GB HDD (dynamic allocated), 2 network adapters (1x NAT, 1x host only).

But it is not possible to create VMs on a remote Virtualbox server. The CLI does not allow to give a remote server IP:

But for some other environments it is possible to deploy VMs on a remote site:

--vmwarevsphere-vcenter: IP/hostname for vCenter (or ESXi if connecting directly to a single host)

If your preferred virtualization engine supports remote servers, you can check here:

Nevertheless docker-machine is an excellent tool. If you are interested in creating a swarm, read this tutorial.
The homepage of the OS boot2docker can be found here.


Related posts:

• Docker on Ubuntu 
• Running through a tutorial / investigating the processes
• Creating a small linux for my docker cluster (Alpine Linux) 
• How to build a docker swarm 
• Creating a minimal webserver container and deploying it to docker swarm
• Setting up a tomcat with docker  
• Running a swarm with multiple managers 
• Mysql inside a docker container - persistency with docker volumes 
• How to change the configuration of a standard docker container(e.g. changing tomcats memory settings)